Is Studying Ethics (or anything) Worth it?

July 20, 2015

Recently, a study released by some philosophers raised this
question, framing it in their study of the ethics of ethics professors. It is
an interesting conundrum, and their results are rather interesting. It turns
out that ethics professors are no more or less likely to behave “ethically,”
and they draw some interesting conclusions about this. What their study and
their conclusions tell us about the liberal arts in general is, I think, rather
important.

To step
back from the question of ethics, a bit, let’s consider the value of studying
anything. It has become fashionable in the new, neoliberal university to
package the study of subjects according to their value on the “job market.”
Marketable skills, whether gained through the study of law, engineering, or
other instrumental fields, give you a means to earn a living -- the ability to
get a job. Perhaps studying one of these subjects improves your resume in some
way, provides you with a marketable skill, and so helps you to find a living.
Many of us believe that the initial assumption is incorrect, and that
marketable skills are poorly understood in a changing job market, which is why
periodically there are gluts and deficits of those with the most valuable
degrees. The market’s preferences for qualities that make people employable are
difficult to comprehend, much less predict. But I digress.

This trend
toward valuing employability is not only likely to produce error due to the nature
of the market and our poor abilities to predict its future needs, but it is
also a poor measure of an education. For similar reasons, the ethics of a
particular ethics professor, or even the whole group of them, are poor measures
of the value of learning ethics.

Ethics
itself is an ill-developed science, despite 2000 or so years of pondering by
some of the greatest minds in philosophy. There is little-to-no agreement as to
its proper theoretical foundations, or even the actual existence of “the good.”
Most ethics professors know this, and most of what we teach in ethics has to do
not with the “correct” answer to particular ethical problems, but rather the
manners in which philosophers have for millennia attempted to solve the problem
of the basis for the good from which we might successfully reason about doing
the right thing (if it exists.)

Unlike most
religions, we have no one rulebook, but rather a bunch of theories whose
foundations are often non-empirical yet rational, and which sometimes conflict
with on another. Many of us think that despite the general failure of ethical
theory, there may still yet be such a thing as “the good” mostly because we
have strong ethical intuitions. Which might all be naïve and false. And so,
given all of this, and given the fact that those trained in ethics appear not
to behave any better than any other group, we return to the question of whether
ethics is worth studying. I conclude as the authors of the study do that yes,
it is valuable to study. As they point out, philosophy is dynamic, and
difficult, and the mere fact that the study of ethics is not clearly
instrumentally useful for creating “more ethical” people, the value of being
able to reason through ethical problems with knowledge of how to do so, and
versed in philosophical vocabulary and methods, makes it worth it.

What is
“worth it” when it comes to study, that’s the catch. The conclusions that
Schwitzgebel et al reach about the value of ethics study are based not on the
empirical research, but are I think quite well-founded in the notion of a
liberal arts education. What is worth studying is that which increases not our
functioning, necessarily, but rather our characters. Are we full human beings,
using at any time the most complete set of knowledge and abilities to reason as
are possible for us to attain? Society will judge our moral characters over
time, based upon the perception of our lives as projects, whether they are
well-lived, rich with examined and realized possibilities, fitting into society
in some way that improves it are at least doesn’t degrade it. We must judge
ourselves as well, based upon similar criteria, unless we think the measure of
the life worth living is only material comfort, then we will likely seek
knowledge of things like ethical theory for their own sake, because
understanding its development and its
shortcomings, as well as the various forms of its theories, is good in itself.

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David Koepsell was Director of Education for CFI. He was executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism from 2003-2008 and was a co-instructor with the CFI Institute from 2012 to 2016. Koepsell has been an Associate Professor of philosophy at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, where he taught ethics and engineering as well as research ethics to masters and PhD students, and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Instituto de Filosoficas at UNAM, in Mexico City where he now resides and works at the Mexican National Commission for Bioethics and the Autonomous Metropolitan University of Mexico City, Xochimilco. He holds a law degree (1995) and PhD in Philosophy (1997) from the University at Buffalo, and has authored and edited numerous books, as well as popular and scholarly articles, and has spoken to audiences worldwide on issues relating to civil rights, secularism, science and technology, ethics, humanism, and ontology. He has provided commentary on these topics in a variety of media outlets including: MSNBC, Fox News Channel, The Guardian, NPR, and the Associated Press, among others. His complete CV can be found at http://davidkoepsell.com.